TY - JOUR
T1 - Unfolding online learning behavioral patterns and their temporal changes of college students in SPOCs
AU - Cheng, Hercy N.H.
AU - Liu, Zhi
AU - Sun, Jianwen
AU - Liu, Sanya
AU - Yang, Zongkai
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank the National Social Science Fund Project of China (grant number: 14BGL131) as well as the Minister of Education of China (grant number: 16YJC880052) and Central China Normal University for financial support (grant numbers: CCNU16A02022, CCNU15A06073, CCNU15A05010, CCNU16JYKX30).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2017/2/17
Y1 - 2017/2/17
N2 - The emergence of massive open online courses not only changes the ecology of higher education, but also facilitates a blending learning paradigm, also known as small private online courses (SPOCs). In order to understand how college students interact with an SPOC platform, this study collects their online behaviors for a semester and adopts a lag sequential analysis approach to identify significant transitions between interactions with content, peers, and instructors. Regarding content, after entering courses, the students tend to access learning resources. Besides, the transitions between learning resources and personal performance are significantly interconnected to each other. Regarding peers, the interaction with classmates was mainly connected to the access of assignments and performance. Regarding instructors, the interaction with teachers was minor but connected to all other behaviors. In addition, the results also show that students’ online behavioral patterns in SPOCs may change over time. The implications of the findings for SPOCs research are discussed in this paper.
AB - The emergence of massive open online courses not only changes the ecology of higher education, but also facilitates a blending learning paradigm, also known as small private online courses (SPOCs). In order to understand how college students interact with an SPOC platform, this study collects their online behaviors for a semester and adopts a lag sequential analysis approach to identify significant transitions between interactions with content, peers, and instructors. Regarding content, after entering courses, the students tend to access learning resources. Besides, the transitions between learning resources and personal performance are significantly interconnected to each other. Regarding peers, the interaction with classmates was mainly connected to the access of assignments and performance. Regarding instructors, the interaction with teachers was minor but connected to all other behaviors. In addition, the results also show that students’ online behavioral patterns in SPOCs may change over time. The implications of the findings for SPOCs research are discussed in this paper.
KW - blended learning
KW - online-learning behaviors
KW - sequential analysis
KW - Small private online courses
KW - SPOC
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85013194782&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85013194782&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/10494820.2016.1276082
DO - 10.1080/10494820.2016.1276082
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85013194782
SN - 1049-4820
VL - 25
SP - 176
EP - 188
JO - Interactive Learning Environments
JF - Interactive Learning Environments
IS - 2
ER -